White Turf in St. Moritz, Switzerland is all about ice. The Luminarias festival in Spain is all about fire. Both involve horses and their riders performing arduous and incredible feats. What’s all of this extreme equine activity about?
travel
In the annals of luxury, Aspen is one of the iconic legends. The name alone evokes a life of beauty, adventure and ease. But is the luxury hype about Aspen still true today? We decided to investigate. Here's how to have a luxurious vacation in Aspen right now.
Selfie sticks are SO last year. For your next vacation, you should bring along the next cool thing in luxury tech: a drone that will follow you down the mountain, or through the waves, or hover beside you at poolside, all in the service of documenting you at your holiday best, even if you’re vacationing solo.
What happens when you combine a drone, a GPS and a small digital camera? The selfie drone!
Just in time for holiday vacations, there’s a new way to document and share every moment of your life. Drones are getting smaller and smarter, and the next generation of them have “follow me” capability. Meaning that if you have a GPS on your person, the drone can tag along behind you (actually, above and behind you), with no additional input or steering from you, and it can capture all of your exploits for posting (from only your best angles, of course).
Mind. Blown.
There’s a great deal of change underway in the luxury luggage category right now. With year-end vacations looming and holiday shopping underway, we here at Dandelion Chandelier thought that this would be the perfect time to test-drive some roller bags, test the IQs of the latest round of “smart” suitcases, and help you make your great escape in style, whether you’re headed for the sand or for the snow.
As you prepare for ski and snowboard season in the Northern Hemisphere, and plot your snow adventures for the next six months, we thought it was time for a round-up of what our luxury class friends will have in their backcountry backpacks and LV suitcases. A couple of our lucky friends regularly ski the world off-piste, and at least half of our pals will be spending the year-end break on the slopes at a luxury resort, so we got the inside skinny on what the jet set is loving right now (you might find some good holiday gift ideas here, too).
Winter is coming, and it’s time to clear out of town, Team Sand. So many choices on where to go, and so little time. To help you make your great escape, we here at Dandelion Chandelier have talked to our luxury class friends who belong in the “never winter” camp, and who have the means to go wherever they choose in the world. Herewith is an overview of the places south of the border where the glamour crowd will be soaking up the sun to mark the end of the year. Depending on what kind of vacation you’re after, and who you’re bringing along, we hope one of these ideas will inspire you to start packing
A short while ago in Manhattan, I was invited to a cocktail party to celebrate the opening of master chef Nobuyuki “Nobu” Matsuhisa’s newest hotel in Miami Beach. The soft launch of the property is timed to coincide with Art Basel Miami in early December (the official opening is in January 2017).
In the farthest realms of wealth, where mega-yachts rule the sea, it is de rigueur to own your own submarine. Or personal submersible. As sea-faring billionaires are wont to say, “scuba diving is great for people who don’t own a sub.”
In the annals of the super-rich, many paragraphs will be devoted to super yachts. Representing perhaps the height of privacy and luxury – and certainly the height of purchase price and ongoing expense – super- and mega-yachts are gigantic, gilded and gorgeous. They’re the ultimate status symbol: Steve Jobs had Venus, Roman Abramovich has the Eclipse, Paul Allen has the Octopus, and the Emir of Abu Dhabi reportedly has the Azzam (complete with its own submarine and missile defense system).
Like many of us, as a parent I sometimes find myself doing things that I really do not feel like doing because it will make my child happy. Last Saturday was one of those days.
The luxury hotel industry is undergoing a dramatic series of changes. The completion of Marriott’s acquisition of Starwood last month means that 30 brands, from very high to very low, are all under one roof. Can a luxury brand be run well when it has that many sisters and brothers? We’ll find out.
One of the less-often-discussed tenets of luxury is based upon the intense desire of the wealthy for time well spent, and never wasted. In my experience, there’s an inverse correlation between a person’s level of wealth and their level of patience, so the cliché turns out to be largely true: the well-off really do behave as if time is money, and they really hate to waste it.
Now that it’s officially autumn, and even the sun-worshippers among us are being forced to accept the inevitable, it seems timely to celebrate the season. Herewith, we share our inside information on how the luxury class plans to spend this fall.
Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines has launched a new advertising campaign that appears to be the perfect intersection of luxury, marketing and tech, and also the quintessential sign of our times. Outdoor ads all over Manhattan show screen shots of fictional Instagram pages with gorgeous photos of luxury life onboard their ships and on excursions to various photogenic ports of call. The ads are complete with multiple hashtags, and of course the obligatory tally of the number of (fictional) likes each post has garnered.
In the highest echelons of wealth, the very idea of flying commercial is a non-starter. This would have been the case a decade ago, and today, it’s without question something that the ultra-high-net-worth crowd will take a hard pass on. The traffic, the security lines, the ground delays – almost anyone who can afford to buy their way out of the hassles of commercial air travel does. And who can blame them? The stress level involved only seems to get worse with each passing day (we’re looking at you, LaGuardia).